No, you can get everything and more in your region through torrents than you can through country and content restrictions because of stupid agreements. I would just advise get into some private trackers with reputable content.

You can enjoy the ease of a commercial service, if you're a "lazy pirate". Better would be a try-before-you-buy; can your friend help with it?

As contrail said, torrent availability is high and if you lack a proper place to put your PC besides the TV (like me), maybe WiFi or a dongle like Chromecast will do.
Finding a video capture card (or usb) capable of ripping the cable signal would be cool, but hard to happen due HDCP.

Hulu and Netflix are very cheap. And obviously they are legal, but if you have a decent VPN and have no worries about downloading, then there is no reason to get them. But in many ways they are easier than torrenting, so it just depends what you want.